#i understand that motiti is the useless cute mascot character but bru did they have to do her so dirty

[giulolosblackmail]

i wanna vent about orens which means i’m angry about hh so like to start off you have to understand that helix waltz is a refurbished and genre transported helix horizon which was a money grubbing jrpg themed fantasy gatcha cn rpg that happened to be headed by this one guy (Mingjing Yoshikawa) who thought having an actual story would make everything better, and he was right! to an extent! helix horizon did do well enough to get a sequel game, but god was the world building and premise covered up by so much horny fanservice that it was hard to take anything seriously

but how does that relate to orens? i’m so glad you asked! you see, orens were created in the world of helix horizon mostly to check off a bunch of older-than-they-look catgirl boxes to fill more niche kinks for the gatcha pool, and you can see this in other characters in HW too (florna hitting the weirdly prevalent busty blonde nun with glasses and anxiety template), which is why orens are largely stupid, child-like, cutesy characters with cutesy names and manner of speech that all have one defining characteristic, because that is the result of churning out gatcha characters, and while HW did a pretty good job patching over HH to make a functional character driven visual novel/dress up game, they never really took orens seriously enough to make them people

i know that orens do get their own political faction in s2 and there’s moves to give them full citizenship, but it is very much an “in spite of everything” kind of move, like the writers for the game are giving orens rights because it is bad to not take the side of characters they wrote as oppressed minorities, instead of because they’ve shown that orens are people that deserve rights

let me explain, in-game orens are described as humanoid orcs, so we can infer that orens are closer to a type of fantasy monster (not people) than fantasy race (people), but they look and act humanoid enough to coexist with other humanoid races like elves and demons, this means we should expect a lowered intelligence and animal-like instincts/characteristics (ie cat orens napping a lot and fox orens being crafty), but on top of that, orens are also glaringly child-like, which i assume is a holdover from the older-than-they-look-loli trope, the most egregious example of which is motiti

i want to like motiti, i really do, but she is literally the poster child for every negative oren stereotype and the story practically bends around her to allow her to exist in-universe, which is insane because she was created just for helix waltz, every other oren that we’ve met has been a fully grown adult regardless of their cutesy appearance, all of them have adult jobs and responsibilities and get mad about being infantilized by others, so we can assume motiti is an adult, she is never treated like a child by the other orens (not even brala - who immediately tried to take care of nyx (16ish teen) - treats motiti like a child), it’s just magda who does this (magda is canonically bigoted in that she treats all oren like they’re children even after helena called her out on making light of brala’s blatantly romantic/sexual crush on her because she never saw him as an adult), and we have no in-universe explanation for why she’s so fucking stupid, her one goal in life is to wear cute maid dresses. she doesn’t... she doesn’t even want to be a maid... I... she’s not even interested in maid dresses in general, just- she just wears them without knowing anything about fashion or quality or modeling or makeup just-

another great example of infantalizing orens is bacon day, bacon day is an oren holiday where pieces of bacon are tied to trees and roofs with long pieces of string so that they dangle around, enticing orens to pounce on them, in-game giulolo was the only oren that had a problem with this because she thought it was undignified, we later find out that she thought it was undignified for a very childish reason and participates in bacon day happily after replacing bacon on strings with books on strings, i think it really just pisses me off so much because they could have actually taken a stance on how orens perceive themselves and deal with the prejudice they face and how giulolo, who meets a lot of rich merchants and nobles through her job, might have taken issue with an oren tradition that feeds into the perception of orens being no better than dumb animals, it’s just this kind of pervasive attitude of the writers never allowing oren characters to actually be sapient enough to comment on their own circumstance that undermines the entire narrative of orens being oppressed peoples and not just animals who can talk, none of them have the capacity to talk about all the horrific murders committed in broad daylight by humans because orens have no protection under the law, this also happens to elves as well, none of the elf characters will give a solid answer on why they’re so ok with being enslaved to humans despite being intellectually, physically, and magically more developed, the two times an elf suggests that they’re unhappy with their situation get quickly resolved without actually changing anything, and i will forever be mad that nala wasn’t chosen when HH was turned into HW (nala was a bavlenka elf that raged against the prejudice she experienced by physically beating the shit out of anybody that said anything racist about elves in her vicinity, she is blatantly unhappy with the way things are and says so)

bUt It’S a DrEsS uP gAmE, why are you expecting nuanced social criticism from an app where you pay 25 dollars to get a pretty jpg that makes the plot progress, shhhhhhhh, i’m just in love with what could have been